The Zero Trust Paradox

This paper explains how traditional email security quietly undermines Zero Trust. While organizations invest heavily in “never trust, always verify” architectures, email security tools often force teams to permanently trust certain senders to keep business moving. These exceptions reduce friction in the moment but steadily create blind spots that attackers exploit. The paper argues that this isn’t a discipline problem, but a tooling problem, and outlines why email security must manage trust with the same rigor, visibility, and expiration models used elsewhere in Zero Trust environments.